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A variational method for relativisticcomputations in atomic and molecularphysics
Jean Dolbeault, Maria J. Esteban, Eric S´er´e
Ceremade (UMR CNRS 7534)CNRS and Universit´e Paris-Dauphine Place Mar´echal Lattre de Tassigny F-75775 Paris Cedex 16 (France)
E-mail:
dolbeaul, esteban, sere@ceremade.dauphine.fr
March 22, 2002
Abstract.
This paper is devoted to the numerical computation of energy levels of Dirac operators with applications in atomic and molecular physics. Our approachis based at a theoretical level on a rigourous variational method. This provides anumerical method which is free of the numerical drawbacks which are often presentin discretized relativistic approaches. It is moreover independent of the geometryand monotone: eigenvalues are approximated from above. We illustrate our nu-merical approach by the computation of the ground state in atomic and diatomicconﬁgurations using B-splines.
2000 MSC:
35P15, 49R50, 81Q10, 65D07, 81V45, 81V55; 34L40, 35A15,35P05, 35Q40, 35Q75, 46N50, 47A75, 47N50, 49S05, 65N25
PACS 2001:
31.15.Pf, 31.30.Jv, 32.10.-f, 33.15.-e, 71.15.Ap; 02.60.Cb, 31.15.-p, 31.15.Ar, 31.70.-f, 32.10.Fn, 33.15.Pw, 71.15.-m
Key Words :
Quantum chemistry – relativistic quantum mechanics – relativisticmodels for atoms and molecules – computational methods – ab-initio methods –basis sets – B-splines – Dirac operators– eﬀective Hamiltonians – variational meth-ods – min-max – minimization – continuous spectrum – eigenvalues – Rayleigh-Ritztechnique – minimization – variational collapse – spurious states
The numerical computation of one-particle bound states of Dirac equa-tions is diﬃcult due to the unboundeness of the free Dirac operator. Severalnumerical drawbacks are present in most of the computational techniques.Various approaches based for instance on squared Dirac operators [25, 1],min-max formulations [23, 4], use of special basis sets [7, 17, 15, 12] or evenmore elaborated methods have been proposed [11, 8], as well as perturbativecorrections to non-relativistic models and derivation of eﬀective Hamiltoni-ans (see for instance [18, 16, 21, 22, 3, 10, 19, 20]). None of these remediesprovides a complete and satisfactory answer. From a numerical viewpoint,the
variational collapse
or the
dissolution into the continuous spectrum
andthe existence of
spurious states
[14, 9] are serious problems which have beensolved in special cases by taking appropriate projections or imposing addi-tional conditions, for instance on a boundary [7].In [5] we proposed an exact and stable numerical method based on a newvariational reduction of the problem to 2-spinorial functions with an appli-cation to the computation of spherically symmetric ground states. Here weexplain the theoretical basis of our approach and then precisely describehow to use this method in atomic or molecular computations. Numericalresults for hydrogenoid ions corresponding to atomic or diatomic conﬁgu-rations are given. We do not pretend to give accurate numerical resultsand this is actually not the purpose of this paper. For instance, we usemeshes with constant steps, which are clearly not optimal. The main pointis that the method does not rely on any special geometry and has inter-esting numerical features: none of the above mentioned diﬃculties occursand eigenvalues are approximated monotonically from above. Moreover, itis numerically tractable and robust, in the sense that no special informationon the solutions needs to be injected in order to provide reliable results.It is well known that the eigenvalues of an operator
H
can be obtainedas critical values of the Rayleigh quotient
Q
(
ψ
) := (
Hψ,ψ
)(
ψ,ψ
)
.
In the case of operators which are bounded from below, with eigenvaluesbelow the continuum, the inﬁmum of the quotient
Q
is the ground stateenergy. However the Dirac operator is totally unbounded. Hence, the sameminimization would take us to
−∞
. One possible way out consists in mini-mizing the Rayleigh quotient on a subspace of spinors which correspond toelectronic states and for which the quotient is bounded from below. In thiscase one is actually solving the eigenvalue equation Λ
H
Λ
ψ
=
Eψ
, where
H
2
is now the Dirac operator and Λ the projector onto the orthogonal to thesubspace corresponding to the negative continuous spectrum of
H
. However,Λ is in general unknown and replacing it by an approximation introducesmany diﬃculties. The method is for instance very dependent on the poten-tial. In the case of nonlinear problems for which the solutions are obtainedby iteration of linearized ones, the potentials change at every step, whichmay cause serious numerical unconsistencies.Here we propose a method which is based on a minimization procedure,but not a direct minimization of the Rayleigh quotient of course. Firstwe eliminate the lower spinor to obtain a second order equation for theupper one. The reduced Hamiltonian is then
eigenvalue dependent.
Aftera further step, we ﬁnally reduce the question to that of
solving a nonlinear scalar equation.
The method applies not only to the
ground state
but alsoto the wave functions corresponding to
excited levels.
In the litterature one ﬁnds many works dealing with the construction of
eﬀective operators
which share the positive eigenvalues of the Dirac opera-tors, but are bounded from below. One way of constructing them is to useprojectors. Formally, if Λ
+
is the positive spectral projector associated with
H
, the equationΛ
+
H
Λ
+
ψ
=
Eψ
will indeed have the good properties of sharing with
H
all its positive eigen-values and having no negative spectrum. Of course the projector Λ
+
is notknown in closed form. In some sense, our method does it in an implicitmanner.Let us now come to the particular case of the Dirac operator
H
=
H
0
+
V
,where
H
0
is given by
H
0
=
−
iα
·∇
+
β
and
V
is a ﬁxed scalar potential.The units have been chosen so as to have
m
=
c
= ¯
h
= 1 and
α
1
,α
2
,α
3
,β
are the Pauli-Dirac matrices. If we write any 4-spinor
ψ
as
ψ
= (
ϕχ
), with
ϕ,χ
taking values in CI
2
, the eigenvalue equation
H ψ
=
λψ
is equivalent to the system

Rχ
= (
λ
−
c
2
−
V
)
ϕRϕ
= (
λ
+
c
2
−
V
)
χ
(1)with
R
=
−
ic
(
σ.
∇
) =
−
ic

3
k
=1
σ
k
∂/∂x
k
where
σ
1
,
σ
2
,
σ
3
are the Paulimatrices. Then, if
ψ
is an eigenfunction of
H
associated with the eigen-3
value
λ
, and if the function
λ
+
c
2
−
V
is never equal to 0, we have:
χ
= (
λ
+
c
2
−
V
)
−
1
Rϕ ,
(2)and
R

Rϕλ
+
c
2
−
V

= (
λ
−
c
2
−
V
)
ϕ .
(3)The above equation, which can be found in several papers as, usually, a ﬁrststep of an expansion procedure, is not linear in
λ
since the Hamiltonian act-ing on the upper spinor
ϕ
depends nonlinearly on it. However, multiplying(3) by
ϕ
and integrating with respect to
x
∈
IR
3
, we get :

IR
3

|
Rϕ
|
2
λ
+
c
2
−
V
+ (
V
+
c
2
−
λ
)
|
ϕ
|
2

dx
= 0
.
(4)It is straightforward to check that for any given
admissible
2-spinor
ϕ
,
i.e.
aspinor for which the integral of the above equation is well deﬁned, there is aunique
λ
satisfying (4). Let us denote it by
λ
(
ϕ
). In [6] we proved that fora large class of potentials
V
including the usual potentials arising in atomicand molecular physics, the ground state energy of the operator
H
(that wedenote by
λ
1
) is the minimal value of
λ
(
ϕ
) over all possible functions
ϕ
suchthat
Rϕ
and
φ
are square integrable:
λ
1
= inf
ϕ
λ
(
ϕ
)
.
(5)In this manner we have managed to minimize the Rayleigh quotient over allbound states of
H
and we have found the lowest eigenvalue of
H
in the gap(
−
1
,
1), or (
−
c
2
,c
2
) in atomic units.In order to design an eﬃcient algorithm for the computation of
λ
1
, wemay reformulate the question as follows. Let
A
(
λ
) be the operator deﬁnedby the quadratic form acting on 2-spinors:

IR
3

|
Rϕ
|
2
λ
+
c
2
−
V
+ (
V
+
c
2
−
λ
)
|
ϕ
|
2

dx
=: (
ϕ,A
(
λ
)
ϕ
)and consider its lowest eigenvalue,
µ
1
(
λ
). Because of the monotonicity of
A
(
λ
) with respect to
λ
, there exists at most one
λ
for which
µ
1
(
λ
) = 0. This
λ
is the ground state level
λ
1
.An algorithm to numerically solve the above problem has been proposedin [5]. Consider the following approximation procedure for
λ
1
. Take anycomplete countable basis set
B
in the space of admissible 2-spinors
X
and4
let
B
n
be an
n
-dimensional subset of
B
generating the space
X
n
(we assumethat
B
n
is monotone increasing in the sense that if
n < n
′
, then
B
n
iscontained in
B
n
′
). Denote by
ϕ
1
,ϕ
2
,...,ϕ
n
the elements of
B
n
. For all1
≤
i,j
≤
n
, we deﬁne the
n
×
n
matrix
A
n
(
λ
) whose entries are
A
i,jn
(
λ
) =

IR
3

(
Rϕ
i
,Rϕ
j
)
λ
+
c
2
−
V
+ (
V
+
c
2
−
λ
)(
ϕ
i
,ϕ
j
)

dx,
(6)where by (
f,g
) we denote the complex inner product of
f
by
g
. The matrix
A
n
(
λ
) is selfadjoint and has therefore
n
real eigenvalues. We compute
λ
1
,n
as the solution of the equation
µ
1
,n
(
λ
) = 0
,
(7)where
µ
1
,n
(
λ
) is the ﬁrst eigenvalue of
A
n
(
λ
). Note that the uniqueness of such a
λ
comes from the monotonicity of the l.h.s. of equation (4). Moreover,since for a ﬁxed
λµ
1
,n
(
λ
)
ց
µ
1
(
λ
) as
n
→
+
∞
,
(8)we also have
λ
1
,n
ց
λ
1
as
n
→
+
∞
.
(9)Another way to see why (9) holds is the following. The solution
λ
1
,n
of (7) is the minimum value of
λ
(
ϕ
) among all the functions
ϕ
in
X
n
, whichagain proves the result if
X
n
approximates
X
as
n
goes to +
∞
, or, in otherwords, if
B
n
converges to
B
.Note that all that has been said about the lowest eigenvalue and theground state energy can be also said for the higher eigenvalues correspondingto excited states. Indeed, the (unique) root of the function which to
λ
associates
A
n
(
λ
)’s
i
-th eigenvalue is an (upper) approximation to the
i
-thexact eigenvalue of
H
. For a given
i
we can either look for the
λ
such that
µ
i
(
λ
) = 0 or use another algorithm yielding all the
λ
i
’s at the same time.5

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